In many environments, take away the ants and there would be partial collapses in many of the land ecosystems.

Competing is intense among humans, and within a group, selfish individuals always win. But in contests between groups, groups of altruists always beat groups of selfish individuals.

But I feel music has a very important role in ritual activity, and that being able to join in musical activity, along with dancing, could have been necessary at a very early stage of human culture.

We don't need to clear the 4 to 6 percent of the Earth's surface remaining in tropical rain forests, with most of the animal and plant species living there.

One thing I did was grow up as an ardent naturalist. I never grew out of my bug period.

Ants make up two-thirds of the biomass of all the insects. There are millions of species of organisms and we know almost nothing about them.

The work on ants has profoundly affected the way I think about humans.

People need a sacred narrative. They must have a sense of larger purpose, in one form or another, however intellectualized. They will find a way to keep ancestral spirits alive.

Jehovah had nothing to say to Moses and the others about the care of the planet. He had plenty to say about tribal loyalty and conquest.

I doubt that most people with short-term thinking love the natural world enough to save it.

An individual ant, even though it has a brain about a millionth of a size of a human being's, can learn a maze; the kind we use is a simple rat maze in a laboratory. They can learn it about one-half as fast as a rat.

Religious beliefs evolved by group-selection, tribe competing against tribe, and the illogic of religions is not a weakness but their essential strength.

All three of the Abrahamic religions were born and nurtured in arid, disturbed environments.

Secular humanists can sit around and talk about their love of humanity, but it doesn't stack up against a two-millennium-old funeral high mass.

When you get into the whole field of exploring, probably 90 percent of the kinds of organisms, plants, animals and especially microorganisms and tiny invertebrate animals are unknown. Then you realize that we live on a relatively unexplored plan.

The two major challenges for the 21st century are to improve the economic situation of the majority and save as much of the planet as we can.

Even as empiricism is winning the mind, transcendentalism continues to win the heart.

It's the technique, I think, of writing a novel that is difficult for a nonfiction writer.

'The Creation' presents an argument for saving biological diversity on Earth. Most of the book is for as broad an audience as possible.

To the extent that philosophical positions both confuse us and close doors to further inquiry, they are likely to be wrong.

I see no way out of the problems that organized religion and tribalism create other than humans just becoming more honest and fully aware of themselves.

We ought to recognize that religious strife is not the consequence of differences among people. It's about conflicts between creation stories.

The historical circumstance of interest is that the tropical rain forests have persisted over broad parts of the continents since their origins as stronghold of the flowering plants 150 million years ago.

I tend to believe that religious dogma is a consequence of evolution.

Real biologists who actually do the research will tell you that they almost never find a phenomenon, no matter how odd or irrelevant it looks when they first see it, that doesn't prove to serve a function. The outcome itself may be due to small accidents of evolution.

Individual versus group selection results in a mix of altruism and selfishness, of virtue and sin, among the members of a society.

Theology made no provision for evolution. The biblical authors had missed the most important revelation of all! Could it be that they were not really privy to the thoughts of God?

By any reasonable measure of achievement, the faith of the Enlightenment thinkers in science was justified.

America in particular imposes an horrendous burden on the world. We have this wonderful standard of living but it comes at enormous cost.

For me, the peculiar qualities of faith are a logical outcome of this level of biological organization.

Once I feel I'm right, I have enjoyed provoking.

Of course, there is no reconciliation between the theory of evolution by natural selection and the traditional religious view of the origin of the human mind.

Religious belief itself is an adaptation that has evolved because we're hard-wired to form tribalistic religions.

I grew up as a Southern Baptist with strict adherence to the Bible, which I read as a youngster.

In addition I wanted to write a Southern novel, because I'm a Southerner.

I had reached a point in my career in which I was ready to try something new in my writing, and the idea of a novel has always been in the back of my mind.

In 2010, my two Harvard mathematician colleagues and I dismantled kin-selection theory, which was the reigning theory of the origin of altruism at the time.

In my heart, I'm an Alabaman who went up north to work.

People respect nonfiction but they read novels.

Because the living environment is what really sustains us.

The biological evolutionary perception of life and of human qualities is radically different from that of traditional religion, whether it's Southern Baptist or Islam or any religion that believes in a supernatural supervalance over humanity.

I thought perhaps it should be recognized that religious people, including fundamentalists, are quite intelligent, many of them are highly educated, and they should be treated with complete respect.

So in my freshman year at the University of Alabama, learning the literature on evolution, what was known about it biologically, just gradually transformed me by taking me out of literalism and increasingly into a more secular, scientific view of the world.

In some ways, I had a traditional 'old South' upbringing, meaning that I spent some time in a military school, and acquired an inoculum of the military ethic that is still with me today: honor, duty, loyalty.